Saturday, June 8, 2013

I would like to preface this post saying that I am not a
member of any OTO or Thelema related body.My opinion comes from personal reading of the subject, and so I speak
from that basis.

Thelema, as I have come to understand it, is very compatible
with Faery in general. My training that
led up to initiation was geared toward strengthening and developing my
connection to my own God Soul, or my own Holy Guardian Angel.By opening that communication, by bringing
myself into alignment with all my parts, I have tried to seek out my True Will,
that which is my Great Work and purpose.When that communication is made, the communication between the part of
the self that is God, and through that God Herself, what external law can
override “Do As Thou Wilt?”When I know
my True Will, and I don’t mean ego based desires, nothing can come in between
me and my Great Work.

But how do we know if what we are experiencing is our
Great Work?How do we differentiate
between Talker only desire and the communicated goals of our personal Holy
Trinity made one?

Will alone is only half of the Law, only half of the
equation that is our shared reality.Will
is the manifest God at work, the Masculine Principle, and I am not referring to
a physical gender.It is Yang, White,
Movement, Electric, Kinetic, or whatever term the individual has linked to this
aspect of the Divine Twins.The problem
with Will alone is that there must be balance.In Faery lore we would talk about the Blue God out of the influence of
the Goddess, and at those times he is terrible.He is the embodiment of base desire without consideration for the
consequences.I think we can simply look
around at the world around us and see the reality of this story.The Goddess has been removed from our
spirituality, and so corruption reigns.But fear not!

The second half of the Sacred Law is Love!When we are aligned and in communion with our
Godsoul, the Love of the Goddess flows through us, side by side with the Will
of God.When I am whole in all my Parts,
and the Love and Sacred Compassion fills me so that my Black Heart overflows,
the purpose of my Will becomes clear.Not only am I the embodied Blue God in action of Will, but I am the Love
of the Mother, and in this balance of the Twins, in this Sacred Dance I am
whole!

Do as the REAL YOU Wills!Love as the REAL YOU Loves!

I don’t mean to imply that the Talker space we generally
inhabit most of the time is a complete illusion, but rather a partial
reality.In order to know the Real You,
you have to bring everything into the fold.

Crowley said that we are witnessing the birth of a new aeon,
what he called the Aeon of Horus, but what in a Faery context I would call the
Aeon of Melek Taus.In my lineage, the
Melek Taus aspect of the overall godhead that we call the Blue God is the
complete balance of the Divine Twins.This model breaks down slightly when we bring the Goddess into the
equation of the Twins, but Faery is paradox, and the totality of one Twin
exists at all times within the body of the other.The Divine Twins are the dance of the holy
binary nature of reality in action.We
are entering the age of balance, of Will and Love existing together, bringing
out the best of both, and tempering away the negative aspects of either.Everywhere around us, more and more people
are waking up to the spiritual reality that coexists side by side with the
physical.More and more people
experience Gnosis within their religion, and when that happens, you realize
that the outer forms that we connect to simply speak to a greater spiritual
truth that can’t be contained within one religion.The old Aeon is fighting back, but only because
they see the writing on the wall.

But an Aeon is much longer than a single lifetime, and we
are just seeing the beginning.We may
not get to see the balance in this temporal incarnation, but we are all faces
of God Herself, and so as we grow and heal ourselves, we heal the world around
us.Gandhi said “Be the change you want
to see in the world,” and this is a spiritual truth.When we bring balance to our own lives, when
we are kala and let our Love and our Light spill out into the world around us,
healing happens.

Today we all have a choice.Do I want to continue living in the old patriarchal
world view?Do I want to be will out of
balance?Do I want to continue the cycle
of damage and trauma that was our birthright?Or do I want to embrace Love and transcend both matriarchy and
patriarchy?To embody both, to BE Melek
Taus, so I can heal myself and those around me.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Kala is, in my opinion, one of the most important concepts for the early student to understand and embrace. The word Kala itself can be used to convey multiple ideas within the Tradition. The first meaning is related to the state of being. To be Kala is to be completely clean within yourself. This is an ultimate state of perfection that we strive for; to be completely unburdened by complexes a...nd blocks so that our three Souls can be in total alignment and we can shine brightly.

The next way that the term gets used is as the techniques that different lineages use to try and attain this state. The Kala Rite, or Making Kala, can and is done in a myriad of different ways, depending on one’s lineage and/or intention. One simple way is to charge a glass of water with mana, and the intention to become pure, and then to drink that water down. To a Catholic, this might seem sacrilegious, because we are basically drinking the Holy Water that we blessed ourselves, but when you look at how much of your body is water, why wouldn’t you wish to drink it? As this water leaves your stomach it becomes part of your overall water system, spreading that blessing throughout your whole body. The last phase is when you urinate next, where impurities that block your connection to spirit are purged with the rest of the toxins you expel. As most of the Feri folk I know tend to be a jovial bunch, when hanging out together we will announce our need to use the restroom by saying “I need to go finish my Kala.”

The Kala Rite is not intended to be something you do once and then you are forever clean and in the Kala state. I wish that were the case, but the reality around us tends to lend itself toward the creation of blockages within the energy body. We pick up lots of toxins as we go through our day, both physically and psychically. Some lines of Feri refer to the Fetch as the “sticky one”, because well, it grabs onto things and has a hard time letting go. Be it the anger someone sent at you because of their own road rage, or any damaging thoughts and emotions that you have yourself, when we are out in the world, outside of the Circle, outside of meditation, you get dirty. And just like we shower or bathe to keep our physical body clean, so we make Kala to keep our spiritual body just as clean.

I also want to point out that this, like many other somewhat abstract Feri concepts, is an ultimate ideal. It is something we strive for, so that in the actions we get closer to the level of perfection that we crave, but is unrealistic to expect to be 100% Kala at all times. I can safely say I have never met a single individual who was always perfectly Kala. The end goal is not the point, the point is the journey there, and it is a journey that will go beyond this single lifetime.

Friday, May 31, 2013

Lately I have been thinking a lot on the Feri phrase that we
all pass along and say, “We don’t give away our power.”On the surface, this sounds great; of course
we don’t want to give away our power, and our culture has trained us since
birth to do just that.But the problem
is when something becomes dogma, and people stop thinking about what something
really means and just take it at 100% face value.I have had many people ask me about this, as
they have reached a point in their practice where their concept of not giving
away power has become problematic.We
tend to not distinguish between different types of energy in our shared Feri technical
language.

So what does that mean exactly?What is OUR power?

When we breathe in the air around us, does that make the air
ours?Well, maybe for a breaths amount
of time, but do we hold our breath and never exhale so that we don’t give away
our air?

We don’t just have one kind of energy running through us;
our energy body is just as complex as our physical one.The vital life energy that has a million
names, but that I will call basic chi, flows through our body just like breath,
and with our breathing.You don’t own
this energy any more than you own the air; it is constantly coming into and out
of our body.Holding onto this energy so
that we “Don’t give up our power” is just as toxic to us as holding onto that
one breath.When we hold onto this
energy psychic gunk and emotional residue build up like energetic carbon
dioxide.

Emotions are powerful, and we feel them strongly and fully,
and then we let them go on the winds of our breath.

The Power that we don’t surrender or give away is the Power
of our Soul.This is what I think is
meant by Personal Power.It is the part
of your energy body that, for the time being at least, is totally you and
yours.The parts of our soul that
splinter off into complexes, the parts that we give away when we surrender to a
life that we don’t want to live but are too afraid to fight.When we give in to the little voice that self
sabotages your path to cultivating this power, that is when you give it away,
and that is what we want to avoid.

But here’s the rub, I have never met a single person, Feri
or otherwise, that NEVER gives away their personal power SOMETIMES.We all do it, and so there is no point in
berating oneself for behaving like a human being.The idea is to be aware as much as
possible.When we are aligned, when we
are centered and living in the moment, we can minimize the damage that our
psyche does to itself.We can call back
the little bits of ourselves that we have splodged away over time.We make Kala to repair and revitalize both
our Chi and our Souls.We monitor our
actions and motivations, so that in the moment we can act, not react, to the
stimulus around us.When we take charge
of our life, we stop giving away this power, while letting Chi flow through
your Fetch like the blood flowing through the soul body of the Goddess that it
is.And then we fall again, and we pick
ourselves up and start over, and each time it gets easier to do so.

So then how can you tell if a particular energy or feeling
is part of your Chi or part of your Soul?Only you can decide that, in the moment, in alignment, and when you have
enough information.Then you can Act
with Your Power and know what is right for YOU.

Monday, May 27, 2013

My personal work has been very Fetch based lately. I have been using a different focus with some Taoist mechanics to really ground into Fetch first before making HA. I have found it to be very helpful for sustainably maintaining connection to Godsoul more throughout the day, outside of meditation. Upon rereading Etheric Anatomy, I remembered the part of my training that talked about a different way to focus on the 3 souls, that of their "aura" within the body. The energy body of Fetch is the aura of your whole body that extends only about a half inch. The body of this soul is the energy of your physical body, so I have been revisiting a lot of my qigong. This ties in with healing from my injury as well. I am far from perfect here, I have a lot of work to go, as part of caring for Fetch is caring for the physical body. To be totally in 100% alignment at all times, one has to have a healthy physical body, which is very difficult. There is no judgment here. I haven't met a single person, initiate or not, who is 100% in alignment at all times, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't kindly strive for it. There is always room for improvement in everything we do, we always are growing and moving. When we think we have perfected something, it can become stagnant. If you are perfect in something, why keep at it? There is no way to improve perfection, so why try?

Most of us expect self perfection, but self perfection is an illusion, so why do we torture ourselves?

Because, for what ever reason, pain is the most effective catalyst for growth within the human condition, initially anyway. I like to think that at some point growth will come for growth's sake, but in reality if I look back on my path, it has been the very painful times that have spurred the most movement. If you are comfortable all the time, what is the drive to change? What would make you get out of bed and do something? Without discomfort, I suspect life wouldn't have evolved past single celled organisms.

But does that mean we are doomed to suffer for our whole lives? I guess that depends on who you ask. I am personally not a Buddhist, so I think that the goal is not to escape pain, but to accept it and move on. Our brains are wired to retain painful memory far more readily than pleasurable experiences. Its evolutionary, we need to remember the painful things so we can avoid them in the future. But we can make a concerted effort to remember the good things too! Why do we forget amazing, ecstatic trance experiences, but remember the mean thing our mother did to us when we were 10? The answer, with so many other things, is knowledge. By being aware of how our brains work, we become less bound by their patterns. By being in the moment, being aware, and being as aligned as we can be, we can make choices to change our patterns. But it requires action, intent, and purpose.

And then shitty things will still happen again.

But hopefully we can use the things we have learned to make those shitty events less painful and not hang on as long. We can remember "Oh, I need to do Kala now. I need to not throw this painful energy down into the subconscious abyss of Fetch. I can look at it here, look at it now, and transform it. I can take right action in the moment to minimize the fallout. I can act in Love and in True Will. I can Be!"

Monday, March 11, 2013

Good morning world, you sure look beautiful today. Even after needing to restabilize from the time fluctuation phenomenon that happens in the spring where it is still dark when I wake up again, girl, you got it going on.

How are you doing this morning? And by you, this time I am referring to the manifest Goddess and yet paradoxically individual deity wearing a cloak of stardust we call a body. You, reading this right now. How are you?

Did you have pleasant dreams? Less than pleasant ones? Dreams can be a powerful influence to how we start our day. Our Talkers can make judgements about experiences, say "It was 'just' a dream" (although that's a whole other topic), but Fetch can't. That is not part of that soul, it's job is to feel, to BE. Your emotional state right now reading this could be directly influenced by dreams that your Talker might not even remember having....Now, if you had awesome dreams of making love to your dream lover on the back of a unicorn while riding over a rainbow, you may be feeling great (That is of course unless you have a phobia of unicorns, rainbows or fucking, but if you have a fear of fucking this might not be the page for you). But less pleasant dreams may leave you feeling a bit on the poopy side.

But fear not! You are not helpless to be left to the whims of your subconscious mind! As always, the power to choose your mindset is within you. Not that just thinking "I want to be in a good mood today" will always do the trick. No, most of the time the decision has to include action. You have to decide to do the things that help you feel better. Decide to make the time to sit and breathe, to align your souls, to make kala

Or maybe you can't make that decision today, and that's okay too. Be kind in all things, and mostly to yourself. Have the same compassion to your own pain that you would to a loved one. It might make the decision easier, or it might not. But it will make your day easier.

Let love into your life, not just on the Pearl Pentacle of your relation to others, but in your own souls.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Feri is about beauty. It is about the ecstatic creation unravelling all around you. It is about loving the Goddess in everything you do. It is about loving yourself in everything you do. It is about finding your True Self and reveling in the glory that is your True Will.

It is not about egos. It is not about the infighting and drama. Those are human symptoms. We are all human, we all have issues, but Feri is the vehicle in which we can unravel and shed those complexes.

So don't look askance at the Tradition I love because of the human drama that plays out amongst us time and time again.

Look at the beauty of the art we have created, the songs we sing, the jokes we tell. That is where you will find the core of what Feri is.

Monday, February 25, 2013

So the day is wrapping up. Night is falling here, the sun well set for many of you. The day was the way it was, good, bad, anywhere inbetween. No matter how it was, it is now over.

How do you unpack your day?

I was pretty tired after mine, feeling all sorts of muck. My own orsplashed my way via aka thread, it really doesn't matter. So I took a shower. I drew a pentacle at the head of the... faucet and ritually washed my body. I washed the muck away. I played close attention to my belly, tuning into Fetch and washing away a days worth of grime attached to my stickiest of Sticky Ones. I opened myself up to the Goddess, I felt her Love.

I would like to report that I feel 100% better, but that would be a lie. But I do feel 75% better, and that's a start. I keep breathing, I keep returning my awareness to center, I'm writing. I continue to care for myself.

That is the challenge. It's easy to find center when you feel good. But if you came to Feri for easy, I'm sorry but you have a fundamental flaw in understanding our tradition.

But it gets easier.

You just keep going, keep breathing. You find a laugh where you can, you feel the love around you. And before you know it you have moved through.

"Do you expect me to go to work today?"
"No Mr. Puck, I expect you to die."

Yes, after two short days of sitting at home and doing whatever your heart desires, it is back to the grind. Or is it? Did you ever leave the grind in the first place? I realize that not everyone has a M-F work week, but follow me here and humor me.

I know calendars show us that Sunday is the first day of the week, but culturally most of us think of Monday as the beginning. Even if you don't work M-F, our first indoctrination to "The Grind" is in school, which at least for me was Monday first.

Today is a special Monday. As the ever so reliable Wikipedia defines Monday:

Monday (i/ˈmʌndeɪ/ or /ˈmʌndi/) is the day of the week between Sunday and Tuesday. According to the Christian, Islamic and Hebrew calendars, it is the second day of the week. But according to international standard ISO 8601 it is the first day of the week. The name of Monday is derived from Old English Mōnandæg and Middle English Monenday, which means "moon day".

Today is the day of the moon, and tonight is the full moon. One could argue that today could be seen as a day of great power. So just for today, let us suspend our adversarial relationship with Monday, try it just for today, and take this as an opportunity.

A day of New Beginnings of the Holy Day of the Moon.

A day to turn our attention away from the things that distract us from our spiritual reality, and to cultivate our True Self.

Have to work today? You could spend the day bemoaning the fact that it is no longer the weekend, but does that change the linear reality of Days of the Week? Or you could choose to find a way to cultivate your spirit in the work. Can't find a way? Well maybe your new beginning should be to spruce up your resume.

I am going to make kala. I am going to do my job to the best of my ability. After work I am going to play with my son. When he takes a nap maybe I will write some poetry, or do some trance work. I will seize the most Holy of days in my religion, the Day of Today.

So what do you choose for your Monday? Bond villain or Holy Day of the Goddess that is Yourself?

So I wrote this poem about 2 years ago. It's short, and raw. It was written at a time when I had been feeling disconnected after a period of solid spiritual activity. But I see now the illusion of those feelings, because even in that dark place I still created. The Great Work isn't necessarily about feeling warm and fuzzy all the time. Sometimes our work makes us walk through the shadows so that when we emerge we can shine all the brighter.

Clouds descend and the darkness falls
Hopeful dreams retreat from the shadowed mass
Anger fills me and I scream
No longer can I believe my lies
Gone is the radiance that once filled me
Ended are the days of light
Sacrificed to feed the Demon within

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

It really is interesting living where the seeds of my religion were first planted. I can feel it in the woods outside my house, the primal energy that my Craft ancestors risked so much to worship in secret. I can go downtown and see the building that was the church their coven would attend, so they could appear to be good Christians like their neighbors. In a very Feri twist of fate, that building is no longer a church, but a Cabaret theater. Walking up to the top of Lithia Park there are a series of pools in the creek that the locals refer to as "The Faery Pools." You could cut the mana in the air there with a knife it is so thick.It is beautiful living in our Mecca, but it is also a bit lonely.By all accounts, that old coven disbanded before WW2, and Victor and Cora moved to California. There have been other Feri folk who have lived here in the past, but as far as I know, I am the only one living here now. I had grown so accustomed to having my coven brothers close at hand, I didn't realize how much their absence would pain me when I left. For many years after moving here, it was so painful that I only practiced my tradition on a very superficial level. I didn't go deep, I didn't really let the wild energy that is Feri course through me. I couldn't; it was a reminder of what I lost.Thankfully I have moved through that somewhat. I remembered something very important that I had forgotten, that in a beautiful rite 5 years ago on this night I became one with the Goddess. I can't be alone in my Craft, because I carry the Gods with me wherever I go. That Feri isn't just about my loved ones far from me, but is really about the loved ones that are all around me. I don't hide from my power anymore. I am even considering coming out of the broom closet at work. Not overtly, not wearing it on my sleeve, but not feeling the need to hide anymore. I stand strong and tall in the Crossroads. I let the Will of the Gods come through me. I let the Will of the God that *is* me continue to unfold. I live, I breathe, I make kala, I LOVE.I still miss my community, but I can connect to them in other ways. I would love there to be other Feri folk here that I could do ritual with, and maybe there will some day. I have taken on a student, although through a distance, and maybe other students who live close by will come. Or maybe they won't. It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. The only thing that matters is the I let nothing come between me and my God Soul as I swore to do 5 years ago. Even if that thing is me.

The Love of the Goddess is all around you. It is in the chair you sit on. It is in the words you read. It is in the air around you.

So breathe it in.

One piece of lore we have in our line of Feri is that Melek Taus is our collective Godsouls. I see it going farther than that. We are the microcosm of the Divine Twins made one within the macrocosm that i...s Him.

Another piece of lore we say, is that Melek Taus is our beautiful Lord of the Painted Fan when tempered under the hand of the Goddess. When out of her presence he is terrible.

I see this played out in the microcosm that is us. Will of the Witch alone is not enough, it leaves us flawed and damaged. We need to be tempered by the Love of the Goddess to reach our full potential.

Feeling blessed this morning. I look around and I see the love and support of a wonderful family.

Yesterday was another story. I got caught up in the pain of the things I don't have. We all have these things. A lot of the time it involves money, but maybe it's not that for you. But the point is there is always *something*. I want to go to Pantheacon and can't afford it. You may want some...one who doesn't return your advances. You may want a new job but can't find it. The what isn't the point, the awareness of the phenomenon is. There will always be something you don't have that Talker will grab onto and say "That! If I could just have that I would be happy."

I hate to be the party pooper, but no it won't.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't move and act to obtain things we desire, but when the want turns to pain over the lack of that we have a problem.

But here is the bright side. We all do it. It's part of the human condition. So don't beat yourself up over it, just notice it and move on.

Breathe. Return to center. See the blessings you have all around you.

I am blessed by my family and the beautiful land around me. What are you blessed by?

Coyote has always been an appropriate name for me. My good friend has a tendency to say "Silly Coyote, tricking yourself again." I have a lifelong pattern of leaping before I look.

This time it was following along with a deity during trance to do a very heavy duty rite involving demon work. I was so caught up in the moment that I didn't stop and notice that perhaps this was not the best moment ...in my linear timeline to engage in such emotion heavy work. Hell, I didn't even stop to think that it would be emotion heavy work. I was too in the moment.

Now, every time this has happened I have always come out the other side the better for the experience, but I seem to manifest these experiences for myself in extremely painful ways.

The purpose of this posting is twofold. First, when working with close, trusted deity, yes they have your best interest at heart, but they don't quite grok our linear existence. "You're here, I'm here, let's do this thing." They tend not to think about external consequence, so when deity presents you with work, it is still your judgement as to when to do it.

Second, you must know your weaknesses as well as your strengths and hold them without judgement. A warrior rushing to battle needs to know where their armor is at its weakest, but also needs to not keep stabbing themselves there. Shoving our pain into the darkness and covering it over is how complexes get strengthened; how Demons come to life. You must own and love your shadow, because that is still you. That is still God.

Just because we fall does not make us any less worthy. It simply makes us human.

Yes, it has been a LONG time since this page was updated. At the recommendation of a close friend I am branching out across multiple social media sites to get my messages across. There will be a lot of cross posting between here and the Facebook page, but I just wanted everyone to know we are alive again here!

How do you define Justice? It is a word we use and hear rather frequently, but when you try to put a hard definition on it, it seems that there really isn't any consensus as to what we think it means. What about Beauty? We can say I find this beautiful, but can we really put that into a hard boxed in definition? We try of course, Beauty could be defined as “Something one finds esthetically ple...asing,” but those words seem so flat, hardly representative of something as glorious as true Beauty.

In Shinto, the word for a spirit is kami, but it doesn't just end there. It is also the word for the feeling of awe one gets when perceiving the beauty of nature. I don't mean to say that these are two separate things that share the same label, but that in Shinto these things are inseparable. But again, it is just a word, and a hard definition cannot contain the entirety of what the word is supposed to label.

What do we say when we say The Goddess? Or Godherself? Or even God? What comes to mind? Perhaps those three words have very different emotional charges for your Fetch, perhaps not.

Is Justice something real? Something tangible that we can put our finger on and say “There, that is Justice”? Would every other person agree with what you are pointing at? And yet, there is the word, the feeling, the idea, that such a thing as Justice exists.

Such is the way with Spirit, with our connection to the Divine. We may use shared language, words like God, or Spirits, or The Way, but the assumption that we mean the same thing when we say those words is false. So when people start to invalidate the experience of others because it deviates from their Way, it shows a lack of understanding of the Immensity of Spirit. The Way that can be named is not Absolute, for no name is Absolute enough to hold The Way.

God is a feeling. God is an experience. God is not a tradition. It is not a label. Traditions and labels are vehicles, not the end result.

God just IS, and who am I to tell you that your IS isn't the Way?

I guess the ultimate question is, Who am I?

THAT'S the work, that's the path, that's the goal. Discovery of God through our experiences. Those experiences come in every shape and size. When we have our attention spend on condemning the experiences of others, that is attention taken away from your own experience, your own relationship with God.

“Abstain from all interferences with other wills. ‘Beware lest any force another, King against King!’ (The love and war in the previous injunctions are of the nature of sport, where one respects, and learns from the opponent, but never interferes with him, outside the actual game.) To seek to dominate or influence another is to seek to deform or destroy him; and he is a necessary part of one’s own Universe, that is, of one’s self.” -Crowley from “Duty”